AI Race May Be on the Docket for Trump’s Meeting With Xi

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President Donald Trump will meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing next week, where official talks on the AI race could be on the docket.

The White House and the Chinese government are weighing the launch of official discussions about AI amid concerns about the competition becoming the newest arms race, the Wall Street Journal first reported. If held, the talks between the two countries on AI would be the first of Trump’s second term.

“The competition with China is fierce. China is a significant competitor in AI,” former AI czar David Sacks said on Fox News last year.

“But China is doing their best to innovate, to work around the restrictions we try to place on them,” he added. “And so they are a significant competitor, and we, basically, can’t get complacent here.”

Both sides are considering a recurring set of conversations to manage risks such as AI models behaving unexpectedly, autonomous military systems, or attacks by nonstate actors through open-source tools, according to the WSJ.

This comes amid reports of one or more executive orders on AI safety regulation coming in the next two weeks.

The White House has worked on several draft executive orders, but the matter of which proposals make it to the president’s desk is still being debated, sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Signal.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will lead the American delegation in the conversations, according to the WSJ.

Bessent said on Fox News this week that the Trump administration is “determined to work with our AI companies to allow them to continue to innovate, but our charge in the U.S. government is maintaining safety.”

“And there is a very important calculus here between innovation and safety,” he said. “And the U.S. government, we’re going to make sure that things stay safe.”

After National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett suggested an FDA-like approval regime for frontier AI models, some AI innovation advocates said they fear this regulation will threaten the United States’ ability to beat China in the AI race.

“I find the idea of any kind of pre-approval process distasteful, but to deliberately invoke the shamefully anti-innovation FDA process as a model to emulate — China must be cheering,” Neil Chilson, head of AI policy of the Abundance Institute, said on X. “This would be a complete rejection of Trump’s current AI approach.”

“It would be more precautionary and innovation-chilling than anything the Biden admin ever proposed,” he added.